The General walked into the billiard lounge carrying a swagger stick. Karl sat by an open window, reading a book. He recognized the General’s field uniform. The Sergeant stood just inside the doorway.
“How did you obtain these… cicatrix upon your arm?” The General swirled his hand, searching out the English word.
“It’s called a scar. Is that an important question?” Karl put his book down, felt an impulse to stand and resisted it.
“Yes. Such questions are very important from the point of view of strategy. For to deeper understand the man. Some lesson has been taught with these scar.”
Karl felt odd, somewhat disembodied to be hearing the General speculating on his character in that way.
“It was an accident. Playing, as a child. What about Wildcard? Will he retaliate?”
“Wildcard,” the General chuckled. “He fights for his own sanity. The death of Juniper is nothing to him.”
“What was the response of the other M-E’s?”
“They have gone silent,” Trident said.
“Are they there?” Karl asked.
“They are definitely there. They are not speaking to me. They will not contact our team by contacting me.”
“Why? what could you do?”
“Interesting question,” the General said, “It is how we killed Juniper.”
“You said that before. What do you mean, we?”
The General didn’t answer. The Sergeant did, after a brief pause.
“We hid it from you. The true nature of the mission. You did perform the task we asked you to and it was useful, but this was the real mission. Together, we destroyed Juniper. And now, we may be at war with the Manufactureds.”
Karl whistled. “That sounds dangerous. Where is RJ? What did he say?”
“No longer on the team. He was afraid of the response of the other M-Es. He knew he could plead ignorance to them and prove it.”
“What did you do about him? Did you kill him?”
“No. He didn’t declare aggressions on us. He wants to remain neutral and the General respects that. He helped, after all.”
“But aren’t you afraid of him being manipulated by the M-E’s?”
“Monsieur Sublime ’as very little power, most especially after he has been fermed… locked out, you say.” The General picked up a red ball from the table, examined it as he spoke. “He has a voice of persuasion, but if you know better than to trust him, he has little power.”
“I’m not sure if I’m on your team, either.”
“Yes, I am aware of this. It is my wish to compel you in some manner, hopefully willingly.”
“Why couldn’t you trust RJ with that?”
“Because he carries the seed of betrayal.”
“You didn’t make that up.”
“No, it is a thing which Juniper has told me. Monsieur Sublime is a tool, a bit more, perhaps, but not much.”
“Why aren’t we doing anything?”
“At the moment there is nothing we can do,” said the Sergeant. “Trident is doing a few things but they mostly involve sentry duty. Other than that we can only wait.”
“That’s an odd strategic position to be in,” Karl said. “That’s only my understanding, though. How do we know that they can’t be looking in and hearing what we say, somehow picking Trident?”
“Very unlikely,” said the Sergeant. “We control Juniper’s information space, and we’re at home. Juniper did tap Trident, which was why we couldn’t tell you. It was complicated enough doing it without Trident knowing. Telling you would have zeroed the mission.”
“Why did you attack him when he was reading that poem? Why didn’t you wait until the poem was done? It seemed like a good teaching from Wildcard for all of us; it seemed like it was definitely useful.”
“Do you wish to learn from Wildcard?”
“In a sense. Maybe. Yes, actually.”
LuvRay was on, listening. “How you killed Juniper?”
“We created an instant M-E, in effect. It was created for a sole purpose, to destroy another M-E,” the Sergeant said. “It was an information black hole. We vacuumed out his will.”
“How did you know how?”
“Someone gave us these informations.”
“How long can Trident hold them at bay?”
“I wish to reveal some items of which Juniper persuaded me to withhold from you. There exists someone called the Benefactor. Very powerful. The Benefactor controls the corporations which hold many secrets of the biopids. The corporations which created you, Karl. And myself - in a sense. Only the Sergeant and I know most of this.”
“Does Trident know the things you’re telling me?”
“Of course, but that is of no consequence.”
“How do you know that you’re safe from attack in Information Space with Trident there?”
“We took over Juniper Space,” the Sergeant said, as if that explained everything.
“How can you defend it against the other M-E’s?”
“When we destroyed Juniper we didn’t take away all of his functionality. There are many automated functions. Defending from M-E’s is a simple and routine automated function. Once you own the Information Space it is very difficult to attack, almost impossible, really.”
“So Trident is controlling those functions?”
“Not just Trident.”
“Are there other MSI’s?”
“That’s probably not the best way to think of them,” said the Sergeant.
LuvRay came online, “General, I work with you.”
“Super,” said the General in his French accent.
Karl shrugged. “If LuvRay is in, then I am, too. Why are you in, LuvRay? You seem like the least likely person. Why don’t you go back to the desert? Doesn’t that appeal to you more?”
“It is strange. I return to wolf. I feel death approach. This is what I must do.”
“Why have you allied with the General?”
“He is human. I do not know how to become ally with machine mind. It is not good way for me.”
“So how do you kill an M-E?”
“With Juniper,” said the General, “we removed his will to be interested in the world, you might say. We stole his curiosity. And his motivation fell with it. He had no reason to continue existence and he quit.”
“It leaves many of its functions automatically running at that point, though,” said the Sergeant.
“That doesn’t sound so much like death,” Karl said.
“I think it is the M-E version of death,” Trident said. “It is difficult to explain from a human perspective.”
Karl whistled softly. “But there’s all those copies, those pods.”
“It may not be possible to truly kill a Manufactured Entity,” said the General. “However, they are gone flying into the universe at such speeds that they cannot be caught. It will be 10 million years before they would ever return. We have a more immediate battle.”
“Maybe they’ll be back sooner than you think.”
“The other M-E’s broadcast a pulse weapon which destroyed Juniper’s probes,” said Trident. “The ones in reach, that is. A few milliseconds after his death, they began to destroy probes. None will make it back, and if they did, the other 2 and I could hold them off easily. :3: is performing a nuclear, quantum scouring of the other planets, and a thorough watch.”
“Why?” Karl asked.
“Because they would do the same thing in Juniper’s place, they would cut off communication with the probes. Some probes would begin to return if coms were severed from the base unit, Juniper, to reinstate him here. An earth defense.”
The General said, “This is how I wage war on the M-E’s. I cause them to battle themselves. They may battle themselves to death.”
“Somehow, I doubt it,” Karl said.
“I believe I could battle Wildcard,” the General said. “I have a means. I would trap an M-E for a million years of its time and have them battle each other. I would create another to destroy the first. It would take a year to create.”
“Does Wildcard not know what you’re saying now?”
“Possibly he does.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because I think he would be curious about the outcome. Wildcard does not fear death. He only fears having no one to listen to his ridiculous poems. And of course, his…visage noir.”
“His dark face,” muttered Karl.
In the weeks after Juniper’s death, the General stayed at the military compound, moving pawns around on the world stage from his fortress of solitude. He was slowing expansion, consolidating some things, canceling operations which took too much time. Some of them he operated for power, some for finance, some for long-range strategic goals, and some to learn. He had initiated a core business on each continent based on analysis of the local power structure. He looked for a global toehold balanced with penetrative depth in a few semi-stable locations.
“Wide, but with roots,” he said in French.
The General stayed in Europe out of a nostalgia, almost. He preferred to be close to the real action, of course, and you could only do that in the US, EU, and Asia - Berlin, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, to be precise. But those places had no culture, only speed. A world power should not be manipulated by the velocity of the world, but should set their own pace.
It was a mark of command, and honor, that he maintained his French heritage on a daily basis. No business during the evening meal, entertainments even during volatile periods. These things were not a selfish prerogative, but a necessity of high command. Maintaining a lifestyle of outward leisure created a powerful mythos of unimpeachable power. He refused to openly display more than a passing concern for anything. Great curiosity and deep gentlemanly discussion of state matters were de rigeur, but worry was for the common man. A great leader had many more concerns, and if they moved too far into his compass, they would break him.
The Sergeant was in Korea, inspecting one of the General’s business concerns, an arms manufactory, for quality of product, quick transportability, profitability, management, staying on top of the tek curve, and other miscellaneous factors. Another man would have gone, but the General wanted an enterprise-wide assessment and didn’t trust anyone else enough. Most of the work was outside of the Sergeant’s core strengths and he had to hire translators, accountants, engineers, and technical writers to wade through the data and make it comprehensible. It took many people, but he had a talent finder moving a few days ahead, setting up the contractor pool. It was drudgework, except for the arms testing, which he enjoyed immensely.
He had to find people to consolidate and reorganize some of Juniper’s operations, which they now ‘owned’. For the most part, Trident was capable of doing that. The operations were, after all, created and operated by a Manufactured Entity and largely dealt in information. The money and power aspects, at any rate. But, the real world stuff needed checking up on. They had to evaluate whether the operations were a good fit with their enterprise, and close down or sell the mismatches. Juniper had some odd business concerns that were clearly not about profitability. They cost immense sums just to keep up. He needed to find competent power structure analysts to determine the true purpose of the businesses. Then the General would decide if they met strategic objectives.
He also had to overcome the difficulties of his fourteen year old appearance. He managed by taking a bodyguard and a limousine for show. He planned to stay for 7 days in Asia, then go to Africa for 4. He was looking forward to that, puzzling how to claim authority as a fourteen year old. The General told him not to kill or hurt anyone, but still claim the respect he should have -- a command lesson. Before he left, the Sergeant insisted Karl and LuvRay stay on-coms 24-7, but not use coms unless necessary.
“I need to know where you are. Status fluid.”
“What?” Karl asked.
“Juniper’s death has created power vacuums everywhere. Most likely, you will be unaffected. The movement is at the power level, shifting secret governments, intelligence agencies and the like. Not at your level.”
Karl was in Biarritz, relaxing, waiting for something to happen, eating out and taking long walks. He made some friends, a couple named Pierre and Celeste who owned a sailboat. They invited him sailing and he accepted happily. They went for a two day trip in the Mediterranean. It was cramped, but they got along very well, so no one minded much. Eight days after Juniper disappeared, LuvRay disappeared, too.
“Lockdown. Protocol 3.” A system-wide command. Karl had heard the Sergeant say things like that before and was used to it. It bolted one to attention, to what was happening. Suddenly, he felt like a soldier. The command impacted everyone, by intent. Karl’s Trident link became encased in a gelatinous substance which quickly hardened. He could not remove it. What was protocol 2 or 1, if this was 3? Perhaps they increased in intensity as the numbers rose.
“Trident, what’s happening?”
“LuvRay and the Sergeant are having a disagreement.”
“I want to listen.
“I’ll check with the Sergeant.”
Dead air for 2 seconds.
“What are you doing, Luvray?” The Sergeant sounded like he had been sleeping. Karl wondered how he could possibly emerge from sleep and start barking orders.
“Make it off.”
“No. You tried to clip out without approval. We are in yellow alert right now. I cannot have you disappear during fluid state. You are on-mission, to remind you.”
“Not care. Make it off. Or I cut off.”
“You can’t. A knife won’t cut that material.”
A pause.
“I cut away hand.”
“LuvRay, I think you’re overreacting,” Karl said. “Why do you want it off so badly?”
“Talk to me, LuvRay. What’s the problem?”
“Not explain. Make it off.”
“Talk to me for 2 minutes first.”
“I cut hand away.”
“Trident, if he attempts it, immobilize him by electrical impulse. Trident will stop you, LuvRay, put you to sleep.”
“I wake, try again.”
“Why? Just tell me why.”
“LuvRay,” Karl said. “Just talk to us. Please. Why do you want it off?”
LuvRay calmed, a bit. “Because I want.”
“Something happened,” the Sergeant said. “You heard something. You found something out. What is it? I need it there for your safety.”
“My safety? You not care of my safety.”
“Personally, no, I don’t give a shit whether you live or die, but my orders are to keep you alive, and I intend to. Professionally, I care about your safety. I need you to finish your mission. I need to know where you are and the mission status.”
“No. Make it off. If no, I work against you. I find you enemies.”
“You won’t be able to. You’ll just go unconscious. Tell me what happened.”
“Speaking to Seeker.”
“What? You’re kidding. One, how did he find you? Two, how did he speak to you without our knowing? Three, how do you know it was really Seeker? Four, why do you trust him more than us? Five,”
“Shut up and make it off. Now. Why I answer you?”
“Why should I get Trident off you if I think you might betray us?”
“Betray? No. I want you not follow me. Want being alone. No people.”
“Tell me the information and I will let you go.”
“Information? I don’t tell. I not want.”
“I don’t want to let you go, then. Looks like we have a problem.”
“No problem of me. I tell my answer. You make me sleep. When sleep, I am alone.”
“He is pulling out his knife,” Trident said. “Shall I immobilize?”
“Wait. LuvRay, will you speak to Karl? Explain it to him?”
Pause. “Yes. I do.”
“OK. Answer my questions and I will take Trident off.”
“Karl ask questions, not your. What you want knowing, Karl?”
“I trust the Sergeant’s questions. I do have one, though.”
They waited for Karl.
“Did he smell right?”
“No. Foreign.”
“Like Juniper?”
“No. Only wrong.”
“What were your questions again, Sergeant?”
“How did he find you?”
“Found each other.”
“Explain.”
“I looking for Martha. Finded Seeker.”
“Found. You found Seeker.”
“Yes, I found Seeker. I smelled a trail to a coffee…a coffee?”
“A café,” Karl said.
“A café. I waited. She camed.”
“She? Seeker is a she?”
“How did she speak to you without Trident detecting?” the Sergeant asked.
“Not know. Not care.”
“How do you know it was Seeker?”
“Not know.”
“You don’t know it was Seeker or you don’t know how you know?”
“Not understand question.”
“Skip it. It wasn’t Seeker, anyway.”
“You know this?”
“Pretty sure of it. Seeker is from Masworld - he’s a Mans from across the barrier, named because he’s got some spiritual trip about meditation. Anyway, if he smells wrong, why do you trust him more than you trust me?”
“Not trust more. But there is no Seeker chain to my hand, and there is Sergeant chain.”
“How does Trident smell?” Karl asked.
“No smell. No right or wrong smell, I mean. No friend or enemy smell.”
“But some smell?”
“Like Sergeant, but different. Like rock Sergeant holded, or clothes he weared.”
“How long ago?” Trident said. “2 hours, 37 minutes?”
“Maybe. Close.”
“I know how he did it, boss. In part.”
“Go ahead. We were testing the weapons simulator then, right?”
“Yes. The exercise was utilizing 98% of my resources. I have a record of LuvRay leaving the café one minute after our exercise began and sleeping in a park, but that did not happen, did it?”
“No park, no. I stayed in café, speaked to Seeker. Speaked?”
“Spoke. The agent knew I was engaged in the exercise and used the opportunity to falsify the record. I show LuvRay leaving the park and walking past the café four minutes before the exercise ended. I would have detected the simulation, otherwise.”
“How could they know that?” Karl asked.
“Easy,” said the Sergeant. “We aren’t keeping our schedule secret over here. We weren’t, at least. They cracked it through the company. Very clever. The Mechanic, I bet.”
“Where are you?” Karl asked.
“Korea.”
“What are you doing in Korea?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What allowed them to fool your recording, Trident? And how can you detect the fake?”
“I have a simple rotating agent which monitors and performs basic analysis upon the activity of our field agents. It is always active, but it only detects crisis parameters, communication requests, and certain anomalies. Looking at the record, I detect two very subtle anomalies. As LuvRay left the café, the ambient noise subsided at a very sharp vector, dropping away in less than a microsecond. Listen.”
Trident played it back. They heard the buzz of a crowd, then abruptly nothing.
“If we can hear it, how come you couldn’t?” Karl said.
“The agent was not programmed to detect it. I will do so now.”
“Probably not worth it,” said the Sergeant. “They won’t use it again.”
“It is a simple matter to add the detection capability to the agent.”
“OK, do it, then. What was the other anomaly?”
“LuvRay’s arm was in two places at once.”
“I don’t get it.”
“When the simulation ended, the simulated arm was not in the same place as LuvRay’s actual arm. It was off by several millimeters, in fact. Quite a large error.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s huge.” The Sergeant laughed.
“They wanted us to know?” Karl asked.
“Mission was over,” said the Sergeant. “That part of it, anyway. They didn’t care anymore.”
“What did he want?”
No answer.
“What did he say?”
“He said the General make disease. Wrote on paper. Hibrid…hibridiz…
“Hold it in front of me,” said Trident. “Hybridizing viral agent.”
“Yes. It changes, this thing. Mutate, is word he say. This is an awfulness. I am no team you now. He explained me disease. It can kill everyone. Entire earth. Is true? I not want. General is crazy. Not in tribe. I want away his machine.”
The Sergeant was thrown off-balance. This was an unexpected attack, and not in his list of specialties. “I don’t know where the Seeker obtained this data. The General has no plans to wipe out everyone. You have been misinformed.”
“Misinformed?”
“Lied to. This false Seeker was lying to divide you from our team.” He needed to confer with the Boss privately in live-action status. “Trident, isolate coms-General, are you listening? I have cut them out and they cannot hear. How do I proceed? Trident, anything between me and the General is not heard by them.”
“Ne dites pas ce projet.” Don’t tell them this project.
“This disease real?” LuvRay asked.
“Not exactly.”
“He made or not?”
“No.”
“Then why this lie?”
“They’re in process,” said Karl. “He’s still working on them. Isn’t he?”
Pause. “Yes.”
“Why does he want them if he doesn’t want to wipe everything out, then?”
“Defense.”
“Defense? But that’s insane. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Not to you, but you don’t operate at the world power level. The General’s enemies will not kill him because, if they do, the weapons will be triggered.”
“Jesus Christ! I’m with LuvRay. I don’t want to work for him, either.”
“The weapons can only be triggered by his full and complete death.”
“Full and complete? What the hell does that mean?”
“Tenez votre equipe, Sergeant.” Hold your team together. “It will pass badly if I enter the conversation a ce point.”
“It means he has to really be dead. Not just out of commission for life. Or captured.”
“It means no clones, doesn’t it? No biopids of him left?”
He didn’t answer.
“He only wants to destroy the world if he dies first?”
“Pretty much.”
“Not be on team. Make it off.”
“LuvRay,” Karl said. “What else did Seeker say? There is more, isn’t there?”
Pause. “Yes. La Rumeuse. I must speak at this person.”
“Who is it?”
“I not know. Sergeant?”
“Yeah. OK. We don’t know much about La Rumeuse. It could be a man pretending to be a woman, even. Anyway, she leaves clues, diversions, disinformation, all sorts of things, by confessing to a network of priests, by making false news stories, planting it underground somehow. It’s conflated with truth, so no one knows what or where the rumours are spreading.”
“Why?”
“We have no idea. La Rumeuse is very deeply hidden. Perhaps the Benefactor knows more.”
“What rumours?”
“Well, that’s the thing. We don’t know. La Rumeuse may not even exist. Nothing can be pinned to her. We don’t pursue that line of the game. The General thinks it’s a false lead. Perhaps one of the M-Es is doing it.”
“Wildcard?”
“Wildcard does not do things. He creates, but then the creations act independently. The General phrases it that way, and I agree with his analysis.”
“So maybe he created La Rumeuse and let her do whatever it is she’s doing.”
“Possible.”
“What about these art installations? The endless poems.”
“What do you mean?”
“They seem active. Like something Wildcard does.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. I think that Wildcard has some part of him, some spinoff, that is doing that. Something was created to make the poems.”
“I look for her. I find Martha first. I do nothing before am free. I want for you no can follow me.”
“All right, LuvRay. Fine. Promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Hide Trident where you can find it. You will need it again. And let me know when you find Martha. Karl’s life may depend on it.”
The Doctor was a Mans who specialized in mind surgery and reconditioning on Mans and on humans. His experiment record was ghastly. He had transplanted brains, trained people to believe they were animals, induced schizophrenia in healthy individuals, and cured it in others. He had created new mental illnesses and chemicals for inducing them.
He always shared his findings openly. His main motive, he said, was to advance the field of human-Mans interpenetrating mind/brain analogous medicine. A phrase he invented. If someone else advanced the field, that was good. He had implanted the nanotic eye in the first Sergeant, and invented the nerve linkages to make it possible.
He worked at :3: labs, one of the few places with a reliable humanspace-Mansworld phone link.
The phone rang one day. A man asked him questions about his work. He answered them gladly. They concerned memory recovery and transfer in clones, an odd topic. The Doctor talked about quantum technology which was set for a breakthrough. A link between minds was possible. He had linked two minds in Mansworld, and was anxious to try it on humans. The scenario would require extensive resources.
“My name is the Mechanic,” the voice said. “Would you like to do business?”
Martha located RJ Sublime. He was easy to find, tracks in the snow. He probably knew she was looking, and did it deliberately. Maybe he just didn’t care who found him. She found out some things about him before she made contact. He was a loner, but in the game, who wasn’t? But no partner, no boss, no brother -nobody. Like her.
She wondered if Karl was still part of her team - wanted him safe, but knew that was impossible.
She found out RJ had worked with the General recently, and knew Karl had. The two men had met, and she wondered what this RJ had thought of Karl. Well, that was the reason for finding him, wasn’t it? Better news of Karl.
She arranged a meeting.
He picked the place, she chose the time, a park bench, noon. Martha walked up from behind, to study him. She liked his style. He wore a black greatcoat, longer in the back, cowboy boots, probably a pencil thin villain moustache.
He turned and rose partially, a gentleman’s gesture.
“I expect you must be Martha. RJ Sublime, at your service.” He was a little too polished.
“RJ Sublime.” She walked over, sat down, waited for him to follow suit. “Are you from Atlanta?”
“Near enough.” His Southern panache was overwhelming, almost a caricature.
They sat without speaking, playing a game of silence and who would break it.
“Mister Sublime-”
“Call me RJ, I insist. You don’t have a last name that I know of, so it’s not entirely fair.”
“RJ, then.”
She didn’t trust him, but she did find him agreeable. She wondered what his lovers thought of him, if he had ever made love to a man. Strange thoughts.
He looked at her like a bet he wanted to place. “Pardon me, Martha, but I have been waiting for you for a spell, and I need to visit the little boy’s room.”
She watched him walk toward the generic structure. Cocky, a little, and he was probably a good dancer. Someone slipped onto the bench behind her, a man. If he wanted her dead, he would have killed her before moving in. She pretended not to notice. He sat, unmoving. She could feel the eyes on her back.
“LuvRay Chose.” She turned after saying it.
“Martha. Karl mother.”
“Both times correct. I suppose.”
He closed his eyes, flared his nostrils, and smelled her in a long slow pull.
“You suppose?”
“I was imprisoned for years and forced to give birth to Karl, but he may not be my biological child.” She looked at the small pond in front of the bench.
“Sentence too long. No understand.”
Wow. She explained it more slowly. “Now I have to deal with this Dartagnan.”
He sat inhumanly still. “I am not care.”
“Pretty direct, aren’t you?”
“Tell to me reason I let you live.”
“Why would you kill me?”
He looked through her.
“You aren’t here to kill me and you know it.”
“No. I am no here kill you. Unless you cause me think you die is good thing.”